A Shanghai Romance that went very wrong….

Like most relationship breakdowns we may never know the true story here…but in October 1942 Henry Wagner of the United States Navy appeared in court seeking an end to his Shanghai marriage. Wagner had been in Shanghai in 1940 with the US military when he met Ah Ling Wang. They appear to have undergone some sort of ceremony but, once he got back Stateside, Wagner decided he didn’t think the marriage was either legal or licensed. From what we can tell from this brief report he’s certainly seeking to paint Ah Ling, aka Irene Wagner, as a bit of an opportunist claiming she “desired only to be married to a white man for reasons of prestige”. Of course as the hearing was in Redwood City, California Ah Ling/Irene herself was not in attendance to make any comment on Wagner’s views concerning her. And given that the case came to court in 1942, a time when America was at war with Japan and all Shanghai under Japanese control her chances of attending the court, or even contacting it, were less than zero. It might be churlish to suggest that Mr Wagner got himself into something while shoreside in the city he later wanted to extricate himself from, but one can’t help wondering whatever happened Ah Ling Wang stuck back in Shanghai.

The newspaper jumped on the marriage as a “Shanghai Gesture” – Wagner came to court around the same time the Gene Tierney movie The Shanghai Gesture hit the cinema in 1942.